Selected ISP Support > Speakeasy > Best Buy acquires Speakeasy??!?

reply to arghJPOJ

Re: Best Buy acquires Speakeasy??!?

reply to lorennerol
Ladies and gentlemen.

If their is any time to bust out the beer and cry, it shall be right now.
--
The only limits we have are the one's we set ourselves.

reply to lorennerol
I received the Speakeasy email, even though it's been almost 3 years since I canceled my Speakeasy service... I wonder if there's a problem with their customer database?

reply to lorennerol
Here is one thing to think about, I believe it to be true, but not 100% certain. I am not pro-Best Buy nor pro-Speakeasy, heck I shop at Fry's and have Comcast, but I wanted to chime in on something that could be relevant.

Just because a larger company buys another company doesn't necessarily mean the corporate or business structure is going to change. Best Buy owns numerous other companies that you would not even suspect such as MusicLand, Future Shop, & Pacific Sales Kitchen and Bath Centers. Think of it as making trades in baseball or football. You give something up, to hopefully get something better; in the business world it's capital (or money).

Best Buy will use the Speakeasy company purchase as a product for their retail stores in the computer department to bundle packages together with their purchases. For instance, you buy a new computer, sign up with speakeasy for a year, and you save $300 off purchase. It's a marketing tool, anybody in the business world understands this.

I guess the only downside to this for the Speakeasy current customers is overselling of their service. With more and more user accounts being activated (given Best Buy does what I used as an example above), the more and more support requests that come in.

reply to lorennerol
I wonder where you could find a small business that would go to Best Buy for anything relating to service or support. Perhaps a lemonade stand, but where could you find a grown-up who's never been to Best Buy?

reply to nshulga

reply to bryank

and small businesses will have nothing to do with Best Buy so it sounds like a real winning combination!

Yep. Within the year, what's left of Speakeasy's skeleton will be sold to AT&T or Verizon for considerably less than Best Buy paid.

They may sell out... err, I mean off... residential customers before that.

If the article at »www.fool.com/investing/general/2···asy.aspx is correct, BestBuy only wanted the VOIP part of Speakeasy. They may well sell off residential DSL customers if this is the case.

The lack of attention to this forum by SE is in line with this notion.

reply to lorennerol
I always try to keep my thoughts with a half glass full of water instead of the half empty one. I will continue to do so now. I can always go with cable and have been able to up to now. I may have to. I hope not. I am happy for Speakeasy but not for myself. If they try to sell off my line connection, good bye Speakeasy and you owe me big time.

reply to jofallon
I wouldn't be surprised if this turns into another Directv DSL situation where subscribers were given only about a months notice that they were shutting down the service. I was one of them and I migrated to Speakeasy. There were signs back then that all was not right with Directv as there are now with Speakeasy. Rather than wait to be pushed out the door this time, I think I'll leave before the rush. I've been looking for a good reason to switch to bway.net...this is probably it.

reply to russotto
Rah, all you people in fios areas, or even prospective fios areas!

I've been a Speakeasy customer for just over two years, and I love my static IPs and reverse DNS.
My other real options in this area are Bellsouth or TWC. I don't want or need a phone line (yeah for onelink), so that's bellsouth out. RR's upload is maxed out at 512 kbps on their highest tear, and obviously it's a completely different class of service. They keep saying they'll up the tears to 8/512 for standard and 10/1 for terbo (or whatever they're calling it), but honestly, I think they're waiting for Bellsouth to make a move, something which, in my opinion, is unlikely for a while.

I actually have both Speakeasy and RR's standard package, because I could only get 1.5 down reliably with Speakeasy, due to my distance from the CO, but the upload was twice as fast as RR standard. Plus, I can run both my and parent's voip phones on the cable line and use all my DSL upstream without conflict.
Considering I have two ISPs, I obviously don't mind paying premium, but this has gone and turned the whole concept for a loop, as far as I'm concerned.

I think, eventually, if RR decides to up the speeds, I will drop Speakeasy and move my servers to a co-lo. I have access to some unmetered bandwidth on an alphared datacenter...

reply to lorennerol
Ok, so let's look at the bright side of things. Yes, everyone can argue on forums, so I am not hear to argue, I have had bad experiences with a ton of companies. Let me Start, Target, where my wife still shops, Walmart, where my wife still shops, Home Depot, where I still shop, Microsoft, where I still run xp, Apple, where my Ipod went dead, get my point? Best Buy knows nothing of Broadband. The fact that the CEO, the CFO and the CTO, have all agreed to stay on at Speakeasy is enough for me to stay. I run servers, even the mighty FIOS, their TOS will not allow me to run servers last time I talked to them. Speakeasy, is not going to outsource their support. That has been guaranteed. No Employees are getting laid off, which means all the awesome techs will still be there. Best Buy when they aquired who was it " Musicland" I don't think I got that name right, but anyways, they failed at that. They will leave Speakeasy alone I think. Speakeasy is not changing its name either. Oh I can run cable to and get 6 megs down at 3:00AM, but no other time of the day. Speakeasy also setup reverse DNS for me for free. Try calling an SBC, Verizon, or a Covad tech in India to do that for you. I am staying with Speakeasy.

From experience, I can tell you promises like those are always made at merger time... and pretty much always broken.

The first noticable change is usually a "harmonization" of administrative policies -- for instance, purchasing, expense reports, and most significantly, HR. The corporate officers may stay for a little while and then leave, or a reorganization may leave them nominally in place but no longer in charge. The people really in charge then start merging business units which are duplicated between the parent and the subsidiary, like customer service. By this time, the better employees have seen the writing on the wall and have bailed anyway. Once this decimation has been done, the offices of the subsidiary will likely be closed and the subsidiary "co-located" with the parent.

Somewhere along the line you can expect to see customer-visible changes, likely touted as implementation of "standard industry practices" -- this is where static IPs go away, port blocking appears, and servers are forbidden. In this case, the likely alternative is that Best Buy for Business will drop or sell off the residential side entirely.

By the time this is all complete, the subsidiary retains little except its name. Assuming the people running it have no clue, it will hemmorhage money and customers, and the parent will put it back on the market, ending up selling it to a competitor for less than they paid for it.

(gloom and doom? Yeah. But I'm the personification of gloom and doom.)

A very likely bet would be that BB sees a good number of people in customer support, some making more than the average Geek squad salary, and then makes economies. Very likely a lot of the SE support people are figuring that too; and will relocate when they can. Doubtless Bruce C will be safe for a year or so, and then will get a nice parachute after a quiet departure. But he isn't providing our service; the good level 2 techs are probably looking at other options right now. They'll probably all get replaced by Geek squad people within a year or two.

reply to lorennerol
I've been an outspoken loyal Speakeasy customer for over 7 years and have gladly been paying twice as much for speeds 4 times slower than cable to my home.

Speakeasy has been a great company, in my opinion. I've watched them grow and expand technologies and services, and all the while they've given me top-notch technical support, when needed, by actual Americans who are skilled network technicians and not just some barely-understandable grunt reading me a FAQ page that I could've Googled in the first place.

Additionally, keeping their employees in America has in-turn helped feed our dwindling economy. Every little bit helps and I'm proud to do my part.

That said, I work for a mega conglomerate with hundreds of aquisitions under its belt. Bruce C's BB acquisition announcement email looks like it was taken from the same template my company uses to anounce a new "exciting" acquisition to the newly acquired employees. Don't believe for a second that things will remain "business as usual" and that the company "culture" will stay the same, even if all BB wants is their interest in SE's VoIP. SE's exec's all know what's going to happen and I would guess their other employees are suspicious of it too. I've seen it many times and been personally involved in several of our aquisitions. Over the next 3 years the conglomerate will transform ("streamline") the business part of things and "overhead".

I, personally, don't believe that SE jobs will even go to Geek Squad folks. That downgrade in salary overhead will not even be enough to make stock-holders cheer. These tech jobs are most likely bound for India baby. Sad, but a cold truth where business cares more about share-values than they do about the customers who put them on the map in the first place, and the employees that feed the economy enough to fuel the market they exist in.

I will not wait until transitioning away from SE is a painful experience due to dialect, administrative authority, and skill barriers. I'm starting the painful transfer process now. I have a lot of services through Speakeasy which will take months to migrate elsewhere.

It's sad, really.

For what it's worth, I wish every one at Speakeasy today the very best and sincerely hope the future for this great group of techies is not as rough as I suspect.

-HiAmp

reply to jofallon

speakeasy.pdf 65,593 bytes

I'm starting the process of migrating myself. I'm not in a mood for waiting for the quality of service to drop off, or to find my line has been sold to someone else. It's just too much money.